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I know you want reviews, and I know you want Hanamonogatari/Five Guys drama, but you’re getting a con write-up instead. Deal with it.

Thursday

7:00 Badge GET

Since I only decided to go to this con on… Wednesday, I wasn’t certain whether I could score a press badge last minute or not, so I bought a normal badge at the con just to be safe. But since it was super ugly, I whined my way into getting a press badge too, cuz Crymore gets hits and cons are impressed by that.

The badges had QR codes or something, but I blacked them out because I don’t know why.

For reference as to what coverage cons usually get, I did some research and found out the most high profile site covering AnimeFest was AnimeSecrets.org. And if none of you have heard of the site before, that’s because it’s complete ass.

Example article:

Sort of makes me wanna check back in on the Aniblog Contest, and at the same time it makes me want to stay far away.

Further research revealed that the con was slotted for 10,000 attendees (was expecting 6k or so), and that I’m the sexiest guy to ever hit the shores of Dallas.

But you already knew that, didn’t you?

8:00 Wandered around at this point, trying to see if there was anything to do.

But there wasn’t.

Heard some humans playing MSI songs (my jam), so I hung around and we small-talked for a bit. However, there’s only so much “Hey I like MSI too” convo to be had before it gets awkward, so I headed back to my room to write some fansub reviews.

But I didn’t.

9:00 Bed time

Clean your ears and ingest some brain advice.

Yes, I went to sleep early. Reason being, Thursday night is generally the only chance during a con you’ll have to get a solid amount of sleep, unless you start to ruminate on how bad the con actually is and go into “I’m gonna go to sleep at 7:00 on a Friday because I’m not enjoying myself” depression mode.

I guarantee you aren’t gonna have fun at a con unless you make yourself have fun, so have some realistic expectations if you do ever decide to hit one of these up. Seriously, I hear people whining about this at every con I go to. I know you’re hikki, but don’t be that guy/girl.

And that’s it for my unsolicited advice corner. Tune in next time for Dark_Sage’s Otaku Sex Tips. It’ll be a good one.

I mean, even if they just recycled my Hadena reviews, there’d be something worth going to a panel for.

Or so I thought.

Pretty much the entire event was just the lolrandom thoughts of some chick who thinks Duwang is hilarious and didn’t understand that the Ghost Stories dub script was intentionally a parody. The presenter also threw out solid lines like “Most videos are in 480p and Duwang decided to be in 240p, which makes them super funny” and “Space Dandy is really good”, so you know she was playing with a half-deck.

Unfortunately, the audience seemed to love it, lapping it up like they had a fetish for scat smoothie. And if a panel of this QUALITY was good enough to for them, I can see why most panels don’t aim much higher than this one did. Anime fans, you only have yourselves to blame. :(

3:00 “Anime Jeopardy”

Actually ended up being video game jeopardy, mostly from video games that weren’t even from Japan.

“Hey, I’m Nathan Drake.”

Yay, anime cons.

5:00 “Pony Character Analysis”

I did a montage of this panel for y’all.

Best pony panel ever.

5:15 “Making Visual Novels”

Since the panelists didn’t show up for the character analysis panel, I bounced over to the VN panel to see what was up. Seemed to be rather solid information (e.g. where to find tools to make VNs, how to find resources to help with adding music/characters/etc.) presented by VN makers that no one knew about.

Well okay, I guess I *have* heard of Backstage Pass. But you get my point. Nitroplus devs, where?

7:00 “Getting Your Friends Into Anime”

I try to attend any animu opinions panel I can, just because it’s entertaining to see how MAL-tier the opinions can get.

This one was sort of decent (I think it’s the first time I’ve been to a panel where the super-excellent Kino’s Journey was recommended as a good intro to anime), except they recommended Noir to newfans. Yeah, Noir. That 13-episode series stretched into a sleep-inducing 26-episode genericfest.

By the way, watching Noir for the yuri is like listening to tATu for the girl-on-girl porn.

If you really wanna recommend lesbian assassins to people (and I can understand why you would), have them watch Canaan instead. It surprisingly has better pacing than a glacier.

Srsly, if you haven’t watched Canaan, you need to upgrade your life.

8:00 Walkcon

Seeing as there weren’t any other panels I was interested in, I took this time to make quite a few rounds of the con space to find some cosplayers worth taking pics of. Also bought some stuff, so have some pics of my swag:

(Technically, I bought the Attack on Titan shirts at a Hot Topic on Thursday, but we’re gonna pretend I got ’em from the dealer’s room or something.)

Normally, Walkcon is also the point where I get really drunk and engage in shenanigans with my friends, but none of you jerks were there, so I had to play it sober. Guess that’s sorta my fault for not letting you know I was gonna go to this until last-minute, but I’m fucking counting on some of you to hang with me at the next con I go to. Do it for the sake of my mental stability/alcoholism.

Yes, Nonon. There IS a problem.
Somehow, both of those images redirect to the same image (the top one). Took me too long to figure out why I had a tab open with the AoT shirt when I wanted to see the pillow :(